You Must Know About Julie Burchill, Who Loathes The BBC Overlords?

She’s a writer. As an established journalist she has written for The Economist about world trade, and latterly moved into fiction, writing psychological thrillers to much positive acclaim. Lately she’s been doing what she does best, pontificating for England. She recently co-authored a “Play About Sex And Brexit” entitled “People Like Us” with Jane Robins.

“I’m a free-spending sort, and rarely swerve the chance to shell out. But this year, when the annual begging letter from the BBC turned up, I handed it to my husband and said “You pay if you want to, I’m done” . Having had Brexit almost evade my grasp, I felt compelled to register my disapproval of the Great and the Good (incorporating the Smug and the Snobby and the Liberal and the Lecturing) somehow”. They hunt people down, even those who just use Netflix!

Scratch a Brexiteer, she avers, and nine times out of 10 you’ll draw the blood of someone who’d like to break free of our BBC overlords too. The EU and the Beeb are so similar, the endless entitlement, the fake enlightenment, the crazed spending of other people’s money.

“People need to shut up,” says Burchill flatly, slurping on a gin and tonic. “We’re leaving, and they’ll just have to get used to it.” Conversation moves to the Liberal Democrat party conference. “If I’ve ever seen a man sailing on HMS Ain’t Getting None, it’s Vince Cable” she trills, in that disarming Cadbury’s-Bunny-on-hippy-crack accent. “Remainers are getting a parasexual thrill out of their mortification. People are getting high imagining a dystopia. It’s masochistic. Almost like a science-fiction brainstorm”.

She can’t suppress a snigger on hearing that Cable’s speech accused Brexit “fundamentalists” of leaving the EU in “an erotic spasm”. “I know I had one” she shrieks. “I thought it was just me!”.

“He’s losing the plot” declares Jane Robins who also writes great thrillers including “White Bodies” . “All we did was vote to leave. We haven’t voted for Armageddon, and yet that’s what we’ve been made to feel like, like we’ve done something really immoral”.

“People think of the EU as this great thing” adds Robins “but actually it causes so much harm. I’m a democrat, and as Tony Benn said ‘If you can’t vote the f***ers out, it’s not a democracy’. We must recognise that the European Community has now set itself the objectives of developing a common foreign policy, a form of common nationality expressed through a common passport, a directly elected assembly and an economic and monetary union which, taken together, would in effect make the United Kingdom into one province of a Western European state”.